Komplete 8 and Komplete 8 Ultimate will be available as of September this year.

This latest version of NI's complete software bundle comes with a total of 27 products. The newly announced version 5 of Guitar Rig and Kontakt are included, as are new additions such as the West Africa percussion instrument, the Studio Drummer drum production instrument, and a dynamic processing effect called Transient Master, which is yet to be released. A trio of the bundle's primary synths, Massive, Absynth and FM8, come with an additional 1,300 presets between them. (See the full range of included products here.)

Komplete 8 Ultimate, meanwhile, offers a total of 50 products, including everything bundled with Komplete 8, in addition to the full range of Komplete Instruments and Effects which comes on a dedicated USB 2.0 hard drive.

Komplete 8 and Komplete 8 Ultimate will be available as of September 2011 at a suggested retail price of $559/499 euros and $1099/999 euros respectively. Upgrades for existing Komplete owners will be available for $229/199 euros and $559/499 euros.

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im glad i came on here and had a read. ive been thinking about buying the komplete 8 ultimate and maschine. seems maschine still has a long way to go before its worth spending the money on.i also agree that the extensive sound librarys given in komplete 8 are "a little for everyone", but in saying that is a really great package to have.ill be interested to see the 1.7 update for maschine and hear some users thoughts on it

Since NI is also promising Maschine 1.7, I have to state that if they don't fix Maschine's software and allow it to access more than one core and more than 3GB Ram in 32bit mode, then the bulk of 32-bit plug-ins from NI and other third party companies will remain in the DAW tracks and not in Maschine. Maschine is promising as the control unit/software fusion to host plug-ins but after three major ones are loaded, it crawls. I'm not even talking about the 64 bit version of Maschine because it is promising but the majority of plug-ins people use aren't 64-bit and it doesn't see or have access to the 32-bit ones in a "bridge" capability like Logic Pro can.

Logic is a DAW and has more behind it but the fact that Maschine is now capable of running plug-ins isn't fully there yet until NI fixes these major things such as RAM and core access in 32-bit mode.

Hopefully this doesn't go the way of Traktor 2's Advanced HID and Scratch certification politics (drama) over the last few months but everyone needs to know that these massive offerings in Komplete 8, 9, 10, 11, etc. will mean nothing but 'excessive collection' if you can't fully use them, all together in NI Maschine.

It starts with Maschine if they want to get this right because currently you are limited in doing major work and faced with making a decision on what to load onto Maschine. The current 32-bit mode is likely the one everyone uses and with NI running promotions for Komplete 8 coming soon, the truth is that they need to get this very real plug-in hosting issue resolved soon otherwise thetruth is that you'l ha to still us the majority of Komplete and other Third Party plug-ins outside of Maschine, NI's promising product that theoritically could do it all but currently can't.

This is not Maschne hate, as a Maschine & Komplete user I did a test to see how many plug-ins it could take from my project's channels (into Maschine's sound slots) and after Kontakt 4 Abbey Roads, Arturia's ARP2600V2 and Reaktor 5's Prism it was done once I added a 1.5 drum kit. Also, my power supply was so hot you could fry and egg on it (or play a good game of "hot potato" with it - which I attribute that to the amount of energy required to over-run one poor little core processor of my 2.2GHz i7).

So, despite the improvements since 1.5 you are limited in capabillty and can actually only run very few plug-ins at once (even in standalone mode).

And not saying that we'll get there but theoretically, Maschine has 128 slots for 128 plug-ins. That would be beyond crazy to manage and not possible with current software but it's actually the idea NI has set themselves up for.

Right now, you might do better sending audio from DAW hosted plug-ins to Maschine and run only samples with a few effects plug-ins.

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